Handling and/or disposal of bacteria-ridden solid waste, from blood borne pathogens to animal excrement, presents a continuing problem of contamination. High levels of bacteria from animal excrement force closures of beaches, parks and river-fronts every year. Retrieving pest traps with injured or dead rodents, insects, lizards, birds, toads, leave the users exposed to diseases, infectious pathogens, and parasites Retrieval of dead birds, as is recommended for testing of West Nile disease, leave users at risk of contamination. Many people must regularly dispose of contaminated meat and other food products. Others clean up disaster, pandemic and accident sites, either trying to preserve items that need cleaning, or to gather evidence. Generally, the people involved wear protective gloves and place much of the solid waste into plastic bags or garbage sacks.
The receptacles used to store the waste may not close or seal properly, allowing odors and possibly fluids and pathogens to escape. Using bags that seal would help correct this problem, but would still leave the user exposed to the waste in the process of retrieval. That may result in using two elements, a glove and a bag, or trying to use a bag as a glove to gather and then seal the waste inside, which limits dexterity, and if using a zip-lock style bag would require everting the bag prior to use.
A low cost, convenient tool that protects the user from touching undesirable waste, that could contain this waste, and seal it from escaping, could be used in many applications. A combination of a light weight plastic glove for dexterity, a sleeve to act as a containment vessel and a zipping style closure system to prevent the waste from escaping, would be the most effective and convenient group of attributes for a product of this nature.
Currently, the general idea for a resealable, everting glove, with a zipper has been cycling in some form for more than a decade, but to date there are no sealable glove bags commercially available in the marketplace. There are several reasons for the non-viability in the marketplace, and a brief description of how an everting glove bag operates may help to understand why.
To make a glove/bag with a zipping-like closure mechanism function as a sanitary containment vessel the user must first don the glove, pick up the item and evert the grasped item back out the end of the glove/bag and then seal the bag with the closure mechanism. The inherent problem to date has been that when the glove bag is everted, the once mated zipping portions have rotated 180 degrees which leaves the closure extrusions opposed to each other and obviously inoperable. To remedy this final opposing positioning of the closure extrusions, one solution, shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,670 Donald Neil Surplus Jan. 6, 1998, everts the entire glove prior to donning the glove. The patent states, “The use of the glove bag 10 is everted and worn over the hand as shown in FIG. 4” The effort to evert the glove is not only inconvenient and time consuming, but the actual eversion of the fingers in a light weight plastic glove is an extremely difficult task, if it can be done at all. It also risks compromising the integrity of the bag and its seal.
It should also be noted that zipping style closures are manufactured in the “sealed” position. If one were to try to evert the bag before use in the manufacturing process after the seal has been made, the following steps would need to be completed. First, one would need to open the sealed zipping closure. Second, one would need to blow or pull the glove and sleeves thru the open end to evert the bag and then finally cut the glove shape. These extra steps in the manufacturing process take more time and hence money. If this type of convenience product is to be made as a viable product for consumer use it must be done at a low cost, which for the most part translates into spending less time on the building table.
The prior art shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,203,080 dated Mar. 20, 2001, teaches that this product must be an inexpensive product. It cites the complexities of U.S. Pat. No. 4,937,881 dated Jul. 3, 1990, U.S. Pat. No. 5,568,955 dated Oct. 29, 1996 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,645,251 dated Feb. 4, 1987. The design in the '080 patent is simple in the manufacturing process, the difficult eversion process is left to the consumer, making it much less of a “convenience product”. If the eversion process were attempted to be completed in the manufacturing process, it would be take several more steps which would cost more which would compromise its commercial viability, and further, even when completed it would leave the bag in a state, where the now inverted seams resist laying in a flat position, which would create problems with handling, packing and shipping.